The equally fabulous comewhatmay.x and SaturnineSunshine did a half hour fic challenge with me last night, and I spewed out this - what began as a Chuck character sketch and ended as pre-series Chair. Written by the light of a vanilla candle with Death Cab For Cutie's 'I Will Follow You Into The Dark' playing in the background.

White Chocolate

Lace; black lace is fanned out across her thighs like a spider's web across a rack, lump forming in his throat to torture him into submission, the same submissiveness which makes him sick to the stomach, breathe on the mirror and write her name in the steam: Blair Waldorf. Queen B. I'd do her. I'd fuck her. Bitch. It kills him and he sometimes just smashes the mirror for the pleasure he gets from seeing her face shatter with the glass. There is nothing darker than her sainted grace, nothing but pure insanity from between parted red lips, breathed out like smoke and straight in his face.

He sees her through the eyes of a child, in the mind of a child, with wide open eyes and slick palms and a racing heartbeat. He drinks her away, hurls her into the drain when he sees his mother flicker across that pretty face.

So he drinks.

And he fucks.

That's him, basically.

The outside world is hard – too hard, somehow – for an Orpheus to walk alone, and everything he charms with his music becomes hard and cold, snakes slithering over snakes and writhing around the apple, the eye of the target and the eye of the storm: don't say her name. What if the dark days come on his day, the day Hell hurled him out and tore the woman who bore him into a battered, bloody mess and sucked out her soul? He makes it clear he wants to be alone; she leaves the same voicemail every damn year, rain or shine.

"It's still your birthday, Chuck. Call me."

They smoke together occasionally – who do you think taught her to roll a joint, Nathaniel? – and sometimes she giggles like the girl she really is and not the doll she's painted into, corseted and cosseted with white lines of perfection which glitter like divided coke on the piano lid. She sat there once, bare painted toes pressing down on the keys while he attempted Moon River, stoned to high heaven. She laughed, and lay back to close her eyes.

He saw up her skirt.

White lace, holy mother of God.

In the name of the Father he tries not to be himself. In the name of the Son, he will drink himself to death one day, curl up into a ball and never rise again. He wonders what her voicemail will be then, what they could have been – but that's stupid after all, frigid bitch, cold from the knees up and fit only to freeze and crack him open. There are so many others, warm and welcoming, waiting for him to wake them up with his black tongued lies and the silver lining which greases his way through the world. One girl is Russian, and she – not her, but her – comes into the room unexpectedly and refuses to leave. He feels odd about the disconnected connectivity she witnesses, the desire to hide under the bed and not be coaxed up for air again. His 'watch, you might learn something' is greeted by silence. The girl leaves and she stays, slung low on an ottoman with hands folded over her aching belly.

"Martini?" He offers.

"No."

"Vodka?"

"That's Serena's drink."

"Tequila?"

"Do I look poor to you?"

There is where the fascination with her neck begins, as they test each other with salt (the SALT talks is how they will refer to them in front of Nate, who might get the wrong idea because he was born that way). He'd rather like to kiss her, one day, maybe when she's smiling – strange that he says kiss and not fuck. Does he...does he want to kiss her? As if. No. He tells himself this the next time he writes her name on the mirror, right before he decides to save her from her own hand at her own party with the lights down and eyes rolling. She screams as he drags her away from the bowl, fingers digging into exposed ribs, breath hot on the back of her neck.

"Do you see?" Her dress is ripped, slip exposed, will o' the wisp body revealed. "Do you see what you're doing to yourself?"

Her head is on the end of the piano nearest to the keys when he plays that time, and he decides on Schubert: a Swansong for a withering cygnet. Her tears fall on his fingers, and sometimes they seem so heavy that they might depress the keys themselves with the disjointed power they contain, amber in a tear instead of a tear born of anger.

"Do you think I'm beautiful?"

"Unfortunately."

"What?"

He looks at her, plays the wrong chord. "Unfortunately, I do."

He finds it hard to look at her when she falls asleep on top of his piano, because he keeps seeing a red dress where there isn't one and decides he must be drunk. Long hair tumbles to his fingers, dancing black and white, black and white, a cacophony of colour even in such a farce. Her body thrums with each keystroke, each breath; he traces her letters on a bare arm and despairs, because there's no way he can break it and no way it will ever, ever wash off. The skin is white, and the invisible words burn golden: seething caramel, white chocolate.

Her fingers catch his retreating one, still fast asleep. She clutches on and they stay, infant and adult, and yea though she walks through the valley of the shadow of death, she should fear no evil.

Devil's got her back.

Fin.